Bush Backs Panel’s Key Voting Ideas

President Bush “heartily” endorsed an ambitious array of proposed election reforms Tuesday, publicly addressing for the first time the failings of the system that propelled him into the White House.

But election experts said some of the recommendations from a privately funded commission chaired by former Presidents Carter and Ford need further study and are unlikely to pass legislative scrutiny.

The report urges Congress to create a federal agency to develop national standards for voting technology, to provide as much as $2 billion to help states buy new equipment and to declare a federal holiday for presidential and congressional elections.

“Today, I accept their report and recommend the key principles drawn from the report as guidelines for meaningful reform,” Bush said in a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House. “They identified some important concerns--for example, the over-eagerness of the media to report the outcome of the elections,” the president said, prompting a wave of laughter.

On election night, the nation’s TV networks declared then-Vice President Al Gore the winner in Florida, all but putting him over the top, only to retract those projections later that night. The networks then awarded the state to Bush--and again had to retract the call. Still later, they declared the state too close to call.

Another of the commission’s recommendations would have the television networks voluntarily give major-party presidential candidates five minutes of free prime air time each night during the final 30 days of a campaign.

Apprised of that proposal during an Oval Office meeting with commission members, Bush reacted with incredulity.

“Every day?” Bush asked, according to Robert H. Michel, a commission member and former House Republican leader.

Michel said that provision also had evoked skepticism among some panelists, including himself. “But you have to throw it out there, and Congress . . . they’re going to work their will anyway.”

Paul Taylor, who advocates similar proposals as head of the nonprofit Alliance for Better Campaigns, said efforts to gain free TV air time in 1996 and 2000 had limited success and were not popular with viewers. Nor are such proposals popular with local station owners and managers, who took in nearly $1 billion in campaign advertising last year.

“The unhappy history is voluntary standards don’t get you very deep into the culture of commercial broadcast journalism,” Taylor said.

Another proposal likely to take flak is the commission’s call for declaring a daylong federal holiday for national elections, or simply moving the election to Veterans Day. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the president “thinks that there are some compelling reasons to have a national holiday” but that he wants to hear from veterans’ groups.

Doug Lewis, head of the Houston-based Election Center, a nonprofit organization that represents thousands of state and local election administrators, said a new holiday could backfire if elections remain on Tuesdays.

“That would mean a four-day holiday,” Lewis warned. “Our fears are you’d have fewer voters and fewer poll workers because they’d take the holiday. Plus you’d end up paying double or triple time for your facilities because you’d have to pay people extra to open schools and other buildings on a holiday.”

Lewis suggested that Congress try a holiday as a onetime experiment or move elections to Wednesdays to discourage turning the holiday into a long weekend. His group will issue their own proposals next week for overhauling elections.

Among the commission’s other recommendations:

* Each state should devise a uniform voter registration system. That task now is done by more than 4,000 individual counties, and “this creates a great deal of confusion,” Carter said.

* A central voter registration clearinghouse should be created to expedite processing of overseas absentee ballots cast by military personnel and other citizens abroad.

* Congress should create a five-member election administration commission, separate from the Federal Elections Commission, to administer matching election grants to states, among other duties.

The National Commission on Federal Election Reform was directed by Philip D. Zelikow, head of the Miller Center of Public Affairs, a nonpartisan research center at the University of Virginia. He said the 19 commission members reached remarkable consensus, given their widely diverging political views.

“Republicans and Democrats often argue about whether government can fix certain problems,” Zelikow said Tuesday. “But everyone on this commission agreed government could fix this. All the problems Americans saw in Florida, and that exist in other states, are problems that government can fix, and at a relatively modest price.”

Panel member Slade Gorton, a defeated Republican senator from Washington, said the commission sought to deliver the report before Congress begins its August recess this weekend. He said some reforms could be in place by the 2002 midterm elections if both houses take up the commission report this fall.

Congress is considering several reform packages; one bill, sponsored by Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), is expected to be approved Thursday by a Senate committee. The bill would require states to meet uniform voting system and technology standards.